Research Roundup: What we’re reading this week

Next week marks a significant step in this year’s presidential elections, as Mitt Romney will become the official nominee for the Republican Party at its convention in Florida. Science and research will likely not appear on the agenda, as Romney, expected Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, and others will instead focus on topics like reducing federal spending. It’s unfortunate that research will not be a part of the conversation, as new predictions coming out this week indicate that if Romney and Ryan win the election in November, changes could be coming for health research and efforts to develop much-needed new tools for global health. As a Nature article this week points out, Ryan—in his current position as chair of the House Committee on Appropriations—has created a federal budget plan that would, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, cut spending on non-defense research and development (R&D) by five percent, or $3.2 billion, below President Obama’s fiscal year 2013 request. Over the long term, Ryan’s approach would reduce funding for R&D to “historically small sizes,” according to Nature. Equally concerning, Ryan’s approach to federally funded R&D could alter US government support for the later-stages of research to develop new health products, including clinical trials. While Ryan’s federal budget plan calls out support for basic research, it would reduce spending for projects deemed “best left to the private sector.” As Nature points out, some advocates “worry that this might include research such as clinical trials sponsored by the National Institutes of Health for therapies from which the drug industry would be unlikely to profit.” Global health R&D is an issue that Republicans and Democrats need to start talking about on the campaign trail. This is an issue that Republicans and Democrats alike need to address. Research to develop new vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, microbicides, and other tools for neglected diseases unquestionably falls under the category of products from which private industry is unlikely to profit. For this reason, the US government has long worked with other partners to bridge this gap. Indeed, global health R&D has historically been a bipartisan issue in Congress that also spans Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, making the US government the largest funder of global health research in the world. And no matter the party in power, the US government can do more to maximize its investments in global health R&D by increasing its support for the later stages of research, as more global health products are moving into the final stages. This makes any proposal to reduce US spending for clinical trials even more worrisome. It’s not just health advocates who want the candidates to talk about R&D issues. A new poll released this week by Research!America finds that voters want to hear about health research funding on the campaign trail. Ninety percent of voters said candidates should speak about medical research, in addition to issues such as tax reform and public education. It’s important that the candidates—from Obama and Vice President Biden to Romney and Ryan—start talking about these issues head-on. And no matter which party takes the White House in November, support for global health R&D must continue.

In this guest post, Margaret McGlynn, president & CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), writes about a new partnership between IAVI and the Indian government. The post originally appeared on the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Impact blog. When you’re dealing with a global public health crisis, having an international presence isn’t just advisable—it is imperative. This applies as much to the development of new tools to prevent disease as it does to treatment. An AIDS vaccine candidate, for example, must be tested in the people who will eventually use it and against the strains of HIV it is devised to protect them from. That’s why (IAVI), in partnership with USAID, has worked diligently over the past several years to establish itself as a truly global nonprofit partner. Using donor funds, IAVI has created an enviable network of research centers in sub-Saharan Africa dedicated to assessing novel AIDS vaccine candidates in clinical trials and conducting supporting epidemiological studies on HIV. These partnerships have made meaningful contributions to the research capacity of many developing countries—a capability that is now helping local researchers tackle other diseases. IAVI and its partners are now applying that same model to support the design of a new generation of AIDS vaccine candidates. Today, IAVI and the Translational Health Sciences and Technology Institute (THSTI), an autonomous institute of the Indian government’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT), launched an HIV Vaccine Design Program near New Delhi. The program is dedicated to the large-scale generation and preclinical evaluation of immunogens, the active ingredients of vaccines. It will focus on devising immunogens capable of eliciting antibodies that can prevent infection by a broad range of the circulating genetic variants of HIV. That challenge, known to researchers as the neutralizing antibody problem, has long stymied progress toward an AIDS vaccine. But recent discoveries of antibodies capable of blocking a number of HIV variants have provided researchers with clues to the design of potentially powerful new vaccine candidates. The HIV Vaccine Design Program will use these insights to develop new methods to generate large numbers of potential HIV immunogens and rapidly assess their potential for use in candidate vaccines. Much of the work will take place in a laboratory housed within THSTI that is being built and staffed with support from IAVI, DBT, and THSTI. The program’s location is no accident. Over the past decade, IAVI has enjoyed a productive partnership for the clinical evaluation of candidate AIDS vaccines with key medical research institutions of the Indian government. Indian scientists have also actively participated in an international consortium of HIV laboratories supported by IAVI to advance HIV vaccine research. The government of India, meanwhile, is in the early phase of its “Decade of Innovation,” a policy that seeks to harness a growing roster of home-grown biotechnology companies, the nation’s deep pool of scientific talent, and global research partnerships to boost innovation in a variety of high-tech fields. The HIV Vaccine Design Program provides an opportunity to engage an emerging economy in the global quest to develop a vaccine against HIV. For India, it creates an opportunity to address a crisis of significant relevance to Indians. As importantly, it seeds the kinds of collaborations that often foster scientific and technical innovation and generate ideas that might be applied to address other diseases that have long hampered development.